"It locates the play's beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the play's first performance. The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that the two could be used interchangeably."
"This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time. On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, based on treating Shakespeare like you would a contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a coincidence."
"And yet there is such terrific daring in Zhao and O'Farrell's stretch: a thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human beings. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. (Shakespeare's horror at the death of Hamnet could have remained dormant for more years than this, and then surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff's wife and young son.)"
The imagined origin of Hamlet is placed in the anguished death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet at age eleven, proposing an emotional link between personal bereavement and the play's tragic themes. The narrative embraces secrecy, parental grief, and linguistic coincidence between the names Hamnet and Hamlet to justify its hypothesis. The portrayal is deliberately speculative and sometimes contrived, yet emotionally impassioned and daring in its reach across centuries. The approach risks misreading Shakespeare by treating him like a contemporary novelist, but the inventive audacity and deep humanization of historical figures lend the project moving resonance.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]